Christopher Nolan Quotes

If you will give the matter a moment's thought, you'll see that memory is the highest faculty of the human mind.

I love the human mind.

If you don't have imagination, you stop being human; animals don't have imagination; Alzheimer's is the death of imagination.

Man is an imagining being.

Consciousness allows you the capacity to plan.

I get my best ideas in that state of suspended consciousness just before sleep.

I would love to think there is a direct relationship between coffee and genius, but they've done studies, and if anything, caffeine probably makes you a little less creative.

The brains -the thinking organs- are the world producers -nature's genitals.

Creativity arises out of the state of thoughtless presence in which you are much more awake than when you are engrossed in thinking.

I feel, I think, I judge; therefore, a part of organized matter like me is capable of feeling, thinking, and judging.

The unconscious is our best collaborator.

The brain is not, and cannot be, the sole or complete organ of thought and feeling.

The nervous system functions in a fourth, unique way, as different as dreaming is from sleeping as sleeping is from waking. When you transcend, it's the only experience that lights the full brain on an EEG machine. It's the only experience that utilizes the full brain.

I remember the initial genesis quite clearly. My interest in dreams comes from this notion of realizing that when you dream you create the world that you are perceiving, and I thought that feedback loop was pretty amazing.

August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied.

"It must be inconvenient to be made of flesh," said the Scarecrow thoughtfully, "for you must sleep, and eat and drink. However, you have brains, and it is worth a lot of bother to be able to think properly."

There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness. At such time, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space, when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate.

The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater power, it is termed a hunch, or insight, or intuition.

Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness.

I think the power of the mind is amazing, and we've barely scratched the surface of what it can do.

Though the Life Force supplies us with its own purpose, it has no other brains to work with than those it has painfully and imperfectly evolved in our heads.

The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is in a way a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons: territoriality and aggression and dominance hierarchies. We are each of us largely responsible for what gets put in to our brains. For what as adults we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities.

it's impossible I should have a mind and I have one

I would be so curious to wire my brain up and see what's occurring when I act, because a performance is such a heightened state. I've always found that with doing theatre especially. It's so hard to come down.